Disqus

Daniel Ha - Co-founder of Disqus

1. How is Disqus doing? It seems a lot of the online chatter about Disqus has died down since Fred Wilson helped provide funding and major bloggers like Dave Winer switched to Disqus. Is that indicative of the adoption you’re seeing?

   Disqus is doing pretty well. We have a great community of commenters and sites using Disqus which, as of this month, is growing at its fastest rate ever. We recently added two people to the team and have been working on a few new things, including an imminent major release. I pay a lot of attention to the online chatter you mention, and I’ve actually been seeing more chatter about blog discussion and comment systems.

   When we first launched the service, there was a lot of blog posts and buzz because we were doing something a little new. Fortunately, the premise we’ve helped introduce has become better recognized (with assistance from the handful of competing services to Disqus) and the overall novelty has worn a bit. Of course, we’ve also been a little quiet in the last month as we focused on improving Disqus. We’ll be making more noise very soon.

2. What technology did you use to write Disqus? Why did you choose it? How has it scaled?

   Disqus uses Django, a Python web framework. We chose Django for a few reasons: a) it allowed us to rapidly prototype and develop; b) we are big fans of Python; c) it’s powerful and easily extensible; d) there was a growing, passionate community behind it.

   Disqus isn’t a destination site, but rather a service that runs across so many different websites. We ran into challenges, both typical and particularly interesting ones. There was a long period during the summer where we devoted much our time and energy into rewriting parts of core Disqus so that we are able to scale much easier moving forward. We’re very confident of our scalability and performance today.

3. What has been the largest hurdle for Disqus so far? Adoption? Finances? Scalability?

   Our largest hurdle was communicating our goals for the service to potential users. We had to package up our thoughts and philosophy around building Disqus and offer something tangibly beneficial to people discovering Disqus for the first time.

4. What has been your biggest personal learning experience from starting and working on Disqus?

   It’s hard to say. I’ve learned so much about the many aspects that Disqus has gone on to touch upon: startups, web communities, scaling web applications, user experience, embracing feedback, the importance of customer feedback, the dynamics of new and current media… many many things.

5. What new online technology has you most excited these days? Why?

   I love new services that takes older mediums, such as print media and television, and breathes new life into them without radically changing our existing behavior. I feel that Disqus is in a good position to achieve this if we continue to innovate in this area.

Matt is very transparent and, from what I’ve seen in all the videos of his presentations as well as our email communications, a very nice guy. He runs his own blog at photomatt.net. Enjoy:

1. You created one of the most popular blog software applications in the world. What was the motivation?

Like many open source projects, I really just wanted something that I would personally enjoy using.

2. What possessed you to give it away for free? Do you regret that choice?

Not for a second. I’ve benefited so much from open source software and the generosity of others in my life, releasing my own work under the GPL feels very natural, and is the rule rather than the exception.

3. Why PHP? How has PHP scaled for you in regards to wordpress.com? Have you found anything particularly challenging?

PHP is great. There are small inconsistencies in the syntax and arguments sometimes, but given all the advantages I really can’t imagine doing a web app like WordPress or Akismet in anything else. It’s been very easy and cheap to scale, as has MySQL.

4. Recently a blogger posted a very negative comment about you, which he has since taken down. You posted the comment verbatim on your blog without any response or commentary. What was your rationale for this? Where does your obvious sense of openness and transparency come from?

In hindsight it probably would have been better to just ignore the blog post, I was just shocked by how out of touch with reality some of the assertions were.

Openness and transparency follows pretty naturally from open source, but most of all I just find it easier than not being open.

5. You are super young. What’s next for Matt Mullenweg?

My general approach to life is just to experiment, fail fast, and run with what sticks. As Automattic grows I think there will be alot more room for experimental projects outside of WordPress.com and Akismet, so
I’m looking forward to breaking new ground.

• What was the inspiration for IMified? Why IM? Are you guys old school users of AIM bots?The inspiration for IMified came about from a real need we were having in managing projects in Basecamp. Adding information to our Basecamp projects was becoming a job in of itself. We longed for an easier way to to dump things like notes and todos into our accounts without having to launch another browser tab and navigate to a web page just to close it after adding. We use IM for communicating with colleagues and friends throughout the day. It’s always on and the interface is clean and simple. It was the obvious solution to our problem. Once we started to see the real value in using our IM client to post data to Basecamp, we decided to connect some of the other web apps we use a lot like Gcal and WordPress. We’re definitely not “old school” bot users, so the learning curve was a bit steep, but where there’s a will, there’s a way.
• What programming language to do you guys use for the site/system? What’s the hosting environment?Most of IMified runs on Coldfusion MX7 Enterprise on Windows Server 2003. We’ve recently setup an Openfire Jabber server for our Gtalk/Jabber users and have some custom Java for connecting to AIM and MSN. Coldfusion’s event gateway’s handle all the back and forth messaging between our app and the networks. We’re big Coldfusion fans if you haven’t noticed.
• What has been the biggest challenge in working with multiple IM protocols from multiple vendors? Which is the easiest? Which is the hardest?Well, there are definitely some challenges and its not so easy to launch and scale a high volume bot. The issues don’t really revolve around the technology for connecting, but the willingness of the networks to let you stay connected. Yahoo actually deleted our screen name without warning and made it clear they are not interested in letting “bots” live on their network. AOL, is much more accommodating, letting you turn your screen name into a bot, and ultimately offering a network agreement if that’s too limiting. Microsoft is still defining their “interactive agent” platform and we’re working with them to define a long term solution. Running a Jabber server also comes with its own challenges. To answer your question, our AIM bot has been the easist to keep running and AOL has been very helpful. Get with the program Yahoo!!We just this week launched our IM widget platform along with a super easy API. So, for those developers out there who would like to skip the above “nonsense”, IMified makes it really easy to build IM access into your existing applications.
• It sounds like IMified was created to fill a need you guys were having with interacting with Basecamp. What is your day job that required you to manage projects?Both Anthony and myself (Dave Hoff), run our own successful IT consulting businesses specializing in web application development.
• Besides IMified, what are your favorite web based productivity tools?We love JOTT, stikkit, GrandCentral, Remember the Milk, and Gmail. Still waiting for that killer app, but when it comes, we’ll definitely IMifiy it : )

1. I recently watched you on episode 14 of CalacanisCast. Do you think it was odd to have a fatblogger eat a doughnut while recording a video podcast?

   Jason Calacanis never surprises me. He lives his own life and it works for him. Expect the unexpected with Jason.

2. Where is your favorite place to social network offline? Conventions, Social Clubs ( i.e. Social Media Club), Professional Groups (i.e. PRSA), Bars, or the Library?

   I love Starbucks and bookstores for hanging out. I remember hanging with Dave Winer and Mike Kaltschnee at a Starbucks a few years ago and we had a hoot (Starbucks is an Edelman client)

3. If you were going to impart one bit of knowledge on the PR industry as a whole, what would it be?

   Never be afraid to dabble in new technology. It’s our future. Some 80% may not pan out but the 20% that does could pay off immensely.

4. What is it about widgets that gets you so excited? How do you see widgets infiltrating the mainstream?

   Widgets are part of a broader trend. We live in a media environment where people like to snack on content all day long and then eat more substantive meals when they have time. Everyone needs to think about taking their content and making it small so it fits where people want to snack it.

5. Speaking of the mainstream, how do you keep up with “what is mainstream?” When so much of your time is spent researching the cutting and bleeding edge, do you find it difficult to stay in touch with the regular computer user?

   I work in a terrific firm with a lot of smart people. I help Edelman stay ahead, but my teammates help me stay in the here and now. It’s a balance, but I work on it every day.

I reached out to one of the developers on the Twitter team and asked if he would answer 5 questions. Alex not only answered them but is very honest and up front with his answers. Thanks Alex!

1. How did you end up on the Twitter team? What is a little of your background?Pretty simple: they posted on their blog that they were looking for
   people in late 2006, and I jumped on it! I think I replied within a
   few hours of the posting. I starting doing contract work on Twitter
   earlier this year, and earlier this month I accepted a full-time job
   after working in the Obvious office for a week. I’m moving out to
   San Francisco in mid-April, and I can’t wait to be out there with the
   rest of the team.I’ve lived most of my life in the Washington, DC area. As one might
   guess, being in the nation’s capital means that everything revolves
   around politics. Most of my early jobs were developing web
   applications for various non-profits, non-governmental organizations,
   and for-profits supporting campaigns and such. I’ve also done some
   information security work (an equally ubiquitous industry around DC).I came to Rails after working in PHP like many developers, but I’ve
   never been a language purist. I was looking at developing some Ruby-
   based blogging software with a friend a couple years before Rails was
   on the scene, but at that time it just wasn’t a friendly language for
   web endeavors. When Rails first crossed my eyes I remember thinking,
   “cool, someone made Ruby work for web apps!” I jumped right in to
   working with the early releases.
2. How has Ruby on Rails been holding up to the increased load?By various metrics Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right
   now. Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues -
   issues that any growing site eventually contends with – far sooner
   than I think we would on another framework.The common wisdom in the Rails community at this time is that scaling
   Rails is a matter of cost: just throw more CPUs at it. The problem
   is that more instances of Rails (running as part of a Mongrel
   cluster, in our case) means more requests to your database. At this
   point in time there’s no facility in Rails to talk to more than one
   database at a time. The solutions to this are caching the hell out
   of everything and setting up multiple read-only slave databases,
   neither of which are quick fixes to implement. So it’s not just
   cost, it’s time, and time is that much more precious when people can['t]
   reach your site.None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing
   for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that
   makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely
   punishing, performance-wise. Once you hit a certain threshold of
   traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that
   Rails does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move
   the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both.It’s also worth mentioning that there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s
   mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It’s great that people
   are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right
   now, it’s tough. If you’re looking to deploy a big web application
   and you’re language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby
   will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big
   Ruby fans, but I think it’s worth being frank that this isn’t one of
   those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.
3. How difficult has it been to add hardware to the environment?We’re hosted at Joyent, and they make the “throw more CPUs at it”
   approach easy. We’ve been able to get new server containers
   provisioned within hours, generally.I’d like to experiment with Amazon EC2 to handle load spikes, but the
   prospective database latency is prohibitive.
4. How large is the current Twitter road map? How many features are you guys looking to add?Not to be evasive, but it’s hard to say right now. There’s a lot
   that we’d like to do while still maintaining a simple, focused, easy-
   to-use service. Lots of people are interested in a groups feature,
   and that’s definitely on our radar. There’s lots of good stuff coming!
5. How do you see Twitter affecting the blogosphere, IM, SMS, and Email?I don’t think Twitter is a replacement for blogging, just as I don’t
   think blogging is a replacement for journalism. As far as
   communicating ideas to an audience, one-to-many, Twitter works best
   for those particular ideas that are terse yet expressive, and don’t
   benefit greatly from an in-place thread of replies. For more
   personal (some might say mundane) updates, I think Twitter is a
   better fit than a blog. People are going to talk about their cats,
   inevitably, but do you really want someone talking about their cat in
   more than 140 characters?I think the real power of Twitter is its ability to channel over
   different mediums at the user’s whim. IM, SMS, email, and the web
   are just transports as far as Twitter is concerned. Generally, you
   have to go out and get information via whatever medium that
   information is on. With Twitter, information can come to you via
   whatever medium you prefer. Or, if you want some space, you can
   easily turn off the information tap with a simple “off” command.
   That’s powerful.